Techniques exist for analyzing captured images in order to perform image matching or other functions, such as the extraction of a fixed, sparse image representation from each image in an image gallery and for each new image to be recognized. Conventional techniques, however, require a great deal of computational power and time. When comparing a new image with all images stored in a gallery of thousands of images, each comparison requires a new, computationally-expensive matching process. There is a need for an image analysis technique that is more easily implemented.